Customer Reviews

Charlotte Hawkins Brown: One Woman's Dream

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My students (I teach African-American studies) found this book very inspiring. This is essentially the story of Ms. Hawkins-Brown and her efforts to bring a school to the impoverished blacks of North Carolina, and how she succeeded in the darkest days of Jim Crow and lynching. It is an interesting added tidbit to consider that she is an ancestor of the singer Natalie Cole.

This story is similar to those of Booker T. Washington, Mary Mcleod Bethune, Rev. Daniel J. Jenkins, Mary F. Wright, and many other founders of Black southern shcools at the time. It is a shame that stories of this kind have not been passed down to inspire the youth as they were prior to the 1960s. Books like this may hopefully rekindle these traditions at a time when such role models are so strongly needed.

Ms. Charlotte Hawkins Brown is an educational pioneer whose life story is relevant today. This book and another one written about her, "Charlotte Hawkins Brown & Palmer Institute: What One Young African American Women Could Do" is testimony of her love for education and her tireless and creative ways to build a school for poor, children in the Jim Crow South.

Visionaries like her create a legacy for many, many children and families in the South and other parts of the country enabling them to transcend the despair of ignorance and poverty and become the hope that she and their parents saw in them as young children and young adults. I, too, encourage this book for students at all levels to learn about her life, to inspire you, and become awe-struck with the tenacity she possessed in a very dangerous and dark time in our history. Her life inspires us to look around and take whatever actions we can to help others achieve an education. Ms. Charlotte Hawkins Brown's life demonstrates that no matter where you are you, too, can create meaningful solutions in service to others who desire to achieve an education and/or overcome poverty and a better life. Just imagine, if she had access to the money that Oprah does today how much more she could have done?

As other readers have stated, attention educators, administrators and charter school faculty and organizers -- this is a life story that needs to be studied for lessons and best practices that can be culled and tweaked for use today. Peace